Books about Deserved from Amazon.com

A new approach to a favorite pastime--rating the presidents--just in time for the inevitable debate about President Bush's place in history

It's a perennial pastime to rate U.S. presidents on an all-time ranking: Certain presidents were "Great," others were "Near-Great," and so on down to "Failures" and "Unmitigated Disasters." (OK, we made that last category up.)

But as Alvin Felzenberg points out, there are many flaws with these rating systems. Despite reams of new historical information, the rankings never seem to change very much. They all favor a certain kind of president--those who tended to increase executive power. That aside, the idea of rating presidential performance on a simple linear scale is absurd.

The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't) breaks presidential performance into easily understandable categories--character, vision, competence, foreign policy, economic policy, human rights, and legacy--and assesses, for each category, the best and worst. The result is a surprisingly fresh look at how the various presidents stack up against each other, with some of the "greats" coming off far worse than their supposedly mediocre colleagues..
Price: $17.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Together with the second report of Faustus, containing his appearances and the deeds of Wagner 1594. The Faust problem was not peculiar to the Christian era. The Jews had their Solomon and the Greeks their Prometheus, but it was only at the end of the Middle Ages, when the old world was in the melting pot, that there arose the most famous of all these legends, the most curious element in which is perhaps the fact that there was at the source of it an actual person..
Price: $21.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Sergeant Peter Collins' cousin, journalist and photographer, Alan Piper, is living next door to the neighbours from Hell. They build a deck that overlooks his patio and monitor his every movement Under the cover of darkness they steal plants and building materials from his garden, but when his gate and gatepost disappear he calls in the police who advise him to put up a CCTV camera. Alan has a better idea. Mousy civil servant Kacy Howell is amazed to suddenly find herself the centre of attention at work and showered with unprompted gifts of flowers, chocolates and - discreetly wrapped sex toys. Her husband, George, is bewildered until a colleague shows him a pornographic magazine aimed at the amateur photographer.Before George finds out if the photos are real, Kacy is found battered to death on the decking that overlooks Alan's garden. Inspector Trevor Joseph and Sergeant Peter Collins find themselves wanting to look beyond the obvious suspect for a murder, which Kacy's neighbours have already Christened 'justifiable homocide'..
Price: $10.23 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Is Bob Fingerman a cynical misanthrope or a disappointed humanitarian? Dare we suggest maybe both? In You Deserved It, the sensitive creator of the acclaimed graphic novel Beg the Question accesses his darker side, serving up this caustic collection of comical cautionary chronicles. What Beg the Question was to sex and romance, You Deserved It is to wanton violence and social wrongness. From "Otis Goes Hollywood," the epic saga of a homicidally puritanical meat packer with dreams of making it big in Hollywood, to "Missing Pieces," a yarn about the extracurricular activities of paramedics, to "Buying Bologna," about a guy who just really, really loves his luncheon meat, to "Yiffy Situation," a fuzzy fable about fornicating Furries, You Deserved It serves up enough yarns to make one hilariously misanthropic sweater, all in living - and dying - color!.
Price: $3.39 [Notify me when price goes down.]